Look Beyond Google – Gain Traffic from YouTube and Twitter

Look Beyond Google – Gain Traffic from YouTube and Twitter

Look Beyond Google – Gain Traffic from YouTube and Twitter

Gordon Fletcher1, Mar, 2011

There is no doubt about Google being the search engine with the biggest market share by far. This makes it the center of attention for search marketers, but recent developments suggest that marketers need to consider others sources of traffic as well. Now social networking sites are not only useful for social media marketing, but also for traffic generation. Google may still be the biggest traffic source, but there is no reason to ignore other sources like YouTube and Twitter.

YouTube Traffic

YouTube is the search engine with the second largest market share. Until recently, users not only searched and found videos on YouTube but also watched them without leaving the site. This did not result in much direct traffic from YouTube to other sites. But the recent changes have made YouTube an attractive platform for traffic generation.

The video search site has decided to give credit to sites responsible for generating more views. An ‘As seen on’ link will be displayed under the videos generating a lot of views. The link being no-follow, it won’t help your Google rankings, but you can get benefits like top ranking in universal search and traffic generation. These should be enough incentives to motivate search marketers to create viral videos.

Twitter Traffic

Twitter can also help increase your website traffic, but the amount of traffic you can generate from twitter depends on your online industry. Until recently, Twitter search did little more than a site search. But things have changed. Twitter search is now behaving more like a search engine. On searching for popular topics, now you will find tweets ranked based on the number of retweets rather than latest tweets being listed on the top. This means that by conducting a keyword research and popularizing specific tweets, you can get top tweet rank for your target keywords. With the increase in the number of people using Twitter search, this can bring a lot of direct traffic to your website.